Invasion!: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Invasion

  Volume I

  The Orion War

  By

  Kali Altsoba

  ©

  Kali Altsoba

  (2017)

  About the Author

  Kali Altsoba is the pen name used in future war fiction by a military historian who teaches at a major research university in the United States. He has published award-winning books on world military history and 20th century military history.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Ditch

  Meadow

  Rout

  Scouts

  Forest

  Roads

  Takeshi

  Temple

  Flowers

  Berm

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Homo homini lupus est

  Plautus, 195 B.C.E.

  Prologue

  The ancient rhythms of war ebb and wane, and ebb once more. A call to arms is heard, fades out, beats again over the low horizon, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat like an old tin recruiting drum. Dogs bark, boys shout, mothers weep as the long gray parades move out. Only fathers boast.

  Past conflicts roll into present fights then forward toward future war, always reaching back into the past to justify the same old acts for the same old reasons, repacked in shiny new causes. The old bloodstained songs are recalled, sung over and over, Words are hardly altered, always crooned to the same ever-changing crowds cheering as troop trains pull away from the maglev platforms.

  All the spiral arm’s history merges into sameness, echoes and recedes into lost tales of shouts and ships and fire and fury, of warriors and wars too easily celebrated and yet far more easily forgotten. Of history as myth. Of myth over memory and reality. Of happy warriors and war joy. War turns back into a legend of virtuous triumph on the winning side, and a pernicious myth of heroic defeat by the loser. We warm our toes in war’s embers and down another drink.

  A long procession of lost generations struts too proudly across Orion’s stage, with little afterward to tell one spectral legion from another as the Thousand Worlds stagger from war into twilight peace and back into a new dawn of war. Nothing essential ever changes, no matter the toll in suffering and destruction of worlds. As it was in the beginning so it remains and so it shall ever be. We shall have war always. War forever and ever. War without end. Amen.

  Every era has its heroes and knaves, its few wise men and many more fools, its wars and truces, temporary victories and lasting defeats. Conquest and expansion are achieved here, harder occupation just over there, with resistance and oppression marking off the edges. The clash and clang of human vanity and vice, ambition and failure rising and falling as it always has, plays out in novel red patterns to the same old results. Markers fade with each pale copy made by Time’s passage. First in reality, then in memory, next in literature and legend, then passed off as history, as old truths are buried deep by fresh and more vibrant lies. The ancient remains familiar only because it is constantly new, vanity building up and smashing down civilizations in recurring cycles, leaving all that is truly important wrecked yet untouched. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia …

  All that will be trouble enough now that the Long Peace is ending across our spiral arm. Yet something worse is coming. We teeming hundreds of billions of the Thousand Worlds have one thing in common beyond the shared wars of our past and the coming Fourth Orion War, the Great War of the closing Age of Kali. We just don’t know it yet.

  We don’t know that something entirely new in history is racing toward us in fast ships, reaching from the far stars to an alien rendezvous with human destiny. When it gets here it will change us and everything we were and are and will ever be, now and forever. Amen anyone? It will change all and change it utterly, this terrible new thing slouching toward Orion to be born.

  Daurans, Grünen, Calmari, the Neutral states, all of us believe we are the only intelligent species to have moved beyond an origin world to reach and settle around other stars. And why not? No other high intelligence or civilization was found in two hundred generations of modern science and exploration. We searched. We found nothing and no one else. Not even ruins of some past rise and fall in the glow of alien suns. Not in two millennia of direct exploration and far more distant measurement. We have every reason to believe that the star-nations we made are the sole advanced civilizations anywhere, unchallenged by any other ascendant power. We are united in the cold, in being the First and the Only, even if we’re hotly divided in nearly all else.

  The day is coming when we’ll learn that we’re wrong. We’re not alone. A malevolent intelligence is stirring, reaching out to cross over to Orion from the Perseus spiral arm. Already, it knows our Thousand Worlds lie on the other side. It plots and broods and builds machines, readying to come over. Preparing to fly The Gap in force to our Orion, bringing with it a terrible war long raging inside the outer, bigger arm. For there is more than one intelligence in Perseus. Two great alien civilizations have been at war there for over 10,000 years, since before we built Ur and Assyria, before we damned the Nile and Yangtze and first watered cultivated fields. More, there’s a third great intelligence as yet hidden from the other two, as all three remain unknown to us here in Orion.

  Whoever wins or just survives the Orion War, if any do, will face a far greater foe and fight in a multi-sided dance of death. For it’s coming, unheralded and unstoppable. A great Spiral War will reach over The Gap between the wispy arms to grasp at Humanity’s puny archipelago of island worlds sprinkled up and down the gas strands of the Orion spur.

  After it arrives things will never be the same. We’ll never again reside on smug little worlds, satisfied and secure and safe from everything but our own vanity and mutual will to destruction. For the first time in all the histories of all the Thousand Worlds we shall meet an enemy in war and find that it is not us. Learn that this enemy is more terrible even than us. Will we be ready? Can we adapt to survive? Or is our very short time done strutting a star-lit stage, making boastful sounds of war and fury that impress only ourselves? Is it all about to end in blood and filth and fires of an alien genocide?

  Perhaps. It might be so, but not yet. War between the spiral arms must wait awhile. First, there’s an old family quarrel that needs settling right here in Orion. A fight just among us humans. It will be long and terrible enough, our Fourth Orion War. So awful we shall record it as the worst of wars. At least until The Envoy arrives to teach us what absolute war among the stars really is.

  Ditch

  Cries. Shouts. Shots. Screams. Running, dying fighters. Inchoate rage. Choking fear. Plasma shells plunging down. Broken rock and trees rising high in explosive bubbles.

  A great unnatural racket. Far-off rumbles under a closer roaring deafness. The cacophony of battle whirtles in blood and metal storms across the broken face of invaded Genève and four more startled worlds. Sights and sounds unknown anywhere in Orion in nearly 300 years.

  Roaring engines. Humming glide boots. Low missiles whizzing past as another assault wave rolls overhead. Funnels of flame and fury burrowing into ground, seeking hidden targets. Blue electric plasma balls. Smaller white bolts of maser fire. Green lasers boring through armor and flesh. Red mist on the air. All the bright colors of battle. A rainbow of death.

  ‘Pit pat, pat pat pitter.’

  A hard rain falls. Armor and bone, broken metal and ceramics, rattling down inside collapsing domes of black soil and shattered rock. Flesh clumps and clods thud! to the ground. Soft hissing gasses rise out of unrecognizable gray clots, the remains of some mother’s son. And another. And another.

  More screams, and the searing smells of war. Piss and pistols, vomit and vehemence, smoky piles of scored
flesh. A hundred unexpected, secret smells. Inside out. Acid and acrid, bitter and odd. Forbidden odors from private places only surgeons and butchers know.

  Tornadoes of whirling violence rip apart landscapes. Murder, mayhem and malice descend from orbit to wreak whole worlds. It’s terrible. It’s insane. It’s glorious and arousing. It’s the greatest theater in all the Thousand Worlds.

  ***

  Jan Wysocki feels a terrible ache pulse down his lower leg, again and again. It’s getting stronger with each throb, worming into his consciousness out of a fog of drugged numbness. He tries not to think about the jagged gash in his right calf made by a spinning hunk of hot frag five days ago. The first time he ever went into battle. The first time he saw the face of war.

  An insistent throb stabs through his fading combat drug-barrier more often and more sharply with each new minute. He tries to shake it off, but he can’t. It’s a deep wound. ‘Well, I’ll just have to bear it. Others are hurt worse.’

  As Jan crouches his nose draws nearer to his wound. It smells less of pus than antiseptic and anti-biots, and just a little bit of AI satisfaction from a purring field-wrap at a job it knows it’s doing well. Some of the pain he should be feeling is held at bay by the lingering effect of the combat modadrene he took before the Grün attack on the Main Defense Line. Five days back.

  While the moda assures wakefulness over a five-day stretch, the real pain-barrier is the suspensor a medic jabbed him with. It’s still deadening his nerves, disconnecting a burned tear in his flesh from registering the agony it wants to communicate to his fertile and suspicious brain, The problem is today is Z+5. His dose is wearing off and his leg and primal brain both know what’s coming.

  The happy field-wrap tightened itself around his wound as soon as the medic slapped it on the jagged tear, just before he stood up and a RIK sniper-bot sheared the top off his head with a blue maser bolt. Like a rondelle of cheese sliced in-half with a cleaver. The indifferent maser left a raw, red-gray slash that not even the most confident field-wrap could ever hope to fix.

  He left the dead medic where he fell. But he took his med pack as he crawled away from the sniper bot’s chosen alley. When he stopped crawling and looked inside he found the pack was empty of moda. ‘Not even our medics were ready for this godsdamn war. None of us were.’

  He chides himself yet again, as he has ever since he looked down in surprise at a red gash that somehow opened in his leg. ‘You’re a damn fool, getting hurt half-a-day into your first fight. Some piss-poor company leader you turned out to be. Just like you always knew you would.’

  Madjenik Company has been resting for three hours. A much needed rest it is. Even powerful stamina pills can push endurance only so far before the body rebels against stress, fear and fatigue, and simply shuts down to protect core systems. The good news is that all the barking Grünen hounds who’ve been chasing Madjenik for five days and nights must also be at least half worn out. Weary of pursuing this especially sly and elusive, if badly wounded fox.

  ‘If that counts as good news.’ Madjenik and the lost-puppy strays it collected during its retreat from the broken MDL are surrounded by far more numerous, more heavily armed, and more confident enemies. It’s able to rest for a few hours on the fifth day of running only because the enemy feels no fear, knows the hunt is all but over, except for the kill. So pursuing Grünen also lay down to rest awhile.

  ‘Right over there, just across a sweetgrass meadow.’ Now Genève’s sun is rising, pulling apart the curtain of orchard mist, shredding it with probing fingers of light, casting the first shadows of overhead branches that stretch thinly over the damp ditch where Madjenik hides. The day is waking up, and therefore so is the enemy.

  ‘We can’t stay here.’ Jan knows it, even as he feels engorged with anger at the pack of enemy hounds doing banal morning chores across the field, languidly rising prior to resuming the baying hunt. Sure it will pick up the scent of the wounded fox before the day is done, and kill Madjenik. A surge of newfound hatred pushes away fatigue and the gnawing pain in his leg.

  ‘We stay, we die. We leave, we die. What do I do?’ The little apple wood behind him is banked by a rough run-off ditch. That’s where he draws his lean, tall body into a compact curl, to assess stirrings in the nearby enemy night camp.

  ‘Only one other choice: we attack. Gotta do it right. I’ve lost too many fighters already. The company can’t afford for me to make any more mistakes.’

  He glances back along the low ditch where the survivors of Madjenik lie or crouch under light field camo sheets, waiting on his last recon and for his orders. Waiting to see if he can keep them alive and get them through another day. It’s all they ask of him, but it’s everything.

  They’re a rough and ragged bunch, a hodge-podge of short-war call-ups and long-service Krevan Republic Army grunts. The old breed of the peacetime KRA mixed up with fresh kids and conscripts. They’re all that’s left of his company, all he’s got.

  Most are resting, clumped in small groups. Or huddled and whispering in dark blue shadows along the lip of the shallow wet ditch which runs down the edge of a little copse of bright green apple trees. This morning’s count in his HUD includes a dozen more vagabonds from other broken companies, lost souls latched onto Jan like sandburs.

  The ditch is just a meter deep. Even so, his fighters are concealed from electronic probes, spy-drones, micro hunters and high-circling skycraft. Concealed from enemy Raptors and Jabos as fighters lie, sit or squat under a rough camo tent pegged to the clay sides of the little ditch.

  The ditch cover is hobbled together from standard-issue, one-fighter camo-and-thermal sheets that share light-refract, heat-block and huff-duff motion blurring. From even feet away the light-and-sound camouflage ‘tent’ conceals the exhausted fighters resting beneath it. From across the meadow it must look to his enemies as if only a stand of apple trees is waking to the dawn. ‘Good thing they all paid attention in basic. They linked up combat sheets just in time.’

  Jan drags his bad leg and lanky frame, trying to stay small as he inches up the cool, clay-sided ditch. A thick clump of yellow tumbles down to rest atop his scuffed combat boot. Smaller bits of dry-caked ochre soil cling to his grubby, wheat-colored combat weaves. Their ‘armored’ ceramic cloth is as flexible and soft as cotton but will instantly turn strong and rigid as ultrasteel if hit, alerted filaments lining up in a hard crystal pattern like iron filings under a strong magnet.

  A thin streak of flattened clay blends with the pale beige of his jacket. It’s smeared over a black, double-headed eagle crest perched right above his right breast, just beneath his captain’s bars. He settles into position and peers through a reed-thin field periscope, slyly poking overtop dew-coated blades of tall sweetgrass. ‘Not much time left to decide.’

  Torresia odorata is abundant in this temperate latitude on Genève, and deeply loved by locals like Jan. The sweetgrass was re-engineered by pioneer AI-bots a hundred generations ago, before the first settlers descended to a pre-terraformed world. Under Genève’s modest gravity it easily grows over two meters high. Vanilla scent from tubular stalks and flat golden leaves fills the air all around. Pungent odors transport him to a more carefree day a year earlier, filled with languorous love-making in a hot summer field just like this one, where ambrosial perfumes of newly crushed sweetgrass entwined with the sweating body of a pliable and eager brunette, legs locked around his waist, thrusting and heaving rhythmically beneath him. He sees her face again, tastes her salty moistness, pulled from the now by a sweet smell of freshly broken grass blades.

  ‘No such luck today.’ He settles as flat as he can across the lip of the damp ditch. It’s still oozing worms and moist odors and morning dew. Perfect droplets appear then evaporate, leaving no hint behind that they were ever there. ‘Would that we could do the same. That would be a neat trick.’

  He raises the periscope above the stalk tops and peers out at the enemy on the far side of the meadow. Tall, sweet, unbroken bla
des wave gently over his head in a light morning breeze. It auto-adjusts range and focus and begins to suggest target selections. He watches a large group of enemy infantry in pale green weaves break up their crude night camp, readying for another day of casual killing. Another day of conquest of Jan’s kin and neighbors.

  The pencil-thin periscope is more precise than his HUD, a manifold with much greater magnification because it sacrifices secondary sensory and coms functions to maximize visuals. He sees in detail a double-crescent moon patch on a picket’s shoulder as the boy turns to face east. His weapon is slung high, on safe, to let him piss languidly over the edge of the meadow. Jan doesn’t recognize the flash, but the periscope answers the minor mystery before he even asks. It signals: “172nd Light Infantry, Rikugun. Homeworld: Uri. Status: conscript.”

  ‘One of the Oetkert homeworlds. With two moons, if I remember my grade school history. An original Waldstätte planet. These “locust” bâtards came straight from the Tennō’s dynastic home! They probably think we should be honored that they’re visiting poor little Genève.’

  “Locusts.” That’s what everyone calls the Grünen swarming over Genève and four other assaulted Krevan Republic worlds: Brno, Lwów, Rhea and the capital world Aral. Wherever the green swarms land they leave death and deserts behind. They’re eating out everything, all that Krevans built over nearly 300 years of peace since the last Orion War. Since the last swarming.